Elise Yee Ling Tan
About Elise Yee Ling Tan
Elise leads communications & community at Vertex Ventures SE Asia & India, an early stage, sector agnostic fund (AUM of $1.5B). Her personal mission is to bring the global startup ecosystem closer together and nurture the entrepreneurs who will change the world for the better. Elise has more than a decade of experience running accelerator programs and helping early founders to learn from experts, fundraise and grow their business. She is the cofounder of Asia Startup Network, one of the largest non-profit communities of > 3,000 startup founders, operators, investors and partners in SE Asia. ASN began firstly with Mentor For Hope in 2020, an impactful mentoring initiative initially supported by the Temasek Foundation under the OSCAR grant. The initiative founded by Elise and Janet Neo facilitated 525 mentoring hours for 300 founders adversely affected by the COVID crisis, connecting them with invaluable insights from 250 investors, partners, and experts. In 2021, together with Andrew Tan, organised Makan For Hope Festival (with zero budget), a series of 30 virtual roundtables featuring VC managing partners and founders from notable startups like PropertyGuru, Shopback, and Carousell. The festival drew participation from 500 attendees. Elise started her venture journey by co-leading the Singapore chapter of Startup Leadership Program, a non-profit accelerator program. Their augural paid program saw 25 fellows who participating. Then, she joined NUS Enterprise as an investment manager, where she helped secure the initial funding for Shopback, ran the first SMRT x NUS hackathon and managed a portfolio of incubated tech startups. After her INSEAD MBA she started the fundraising team at Entrepreneur First in Singapore, to help over 40 startups in securing an avg. seed round of $1.4 M within 6 to 9 months from graduation. She also established a network of > 2,000 investors around SE Asia, India and USA. Subsequently, she brought her expertise to Longhash Ventures, a web3 vc and accelerator, where she served as the VP for fundraising. As an active connector, she has made over 100s of investor (VCs, family offices and strategic angels) introductions to over 200 startups across various verticals. Back in school, she served in several leadership capacity - the President for INSEAD Entrepreneurship Club and Vice President for Chemical Engineering Students' Society at NUS. She is an advisor to the NUS Angels Ventures, SE Asia's first student run angel investment network and other organisations. She is also an alumna of NUS Overseas College program.